Newly declassified documents have now reportedly shed fresh light on the FBI’s controversial 2022 raid of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, revealing that senior bureau officials privately questioned whether they had probable cause to conduct the search — but moved ahead anyway amid pressure from the Biden Justice Department.
The internal emails, exchanged between FBI and DOJ officials in the months leading up to the August 2022 raid, show repeated concern inside the FBI that the evidence did not meet the legal threshold required for such an unprecedented action against a president.
In one email, an FBI official serving as an assistant special agent in charge warned that investigators had developed “very little” evidence identifying who might be responsible for mishandling documents. The official acknowledged that interviews conducted by the FBI’s Washington Field Office suggested there “may be additional boxes” at Mar-a-Lago similar to those previously returned to the National Archives in January — but stressed the information was thin.
“WFO has been drafting a search warrant affidavit related to these potential boxes, but has some concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and may be dated,” the official wrote. Despite those reservations, the email noted that DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section believed the warrants met the probable cause standard.
Even while preparing for a raid, the FBI official argued there was a less aggressive and more reasonable alternative: communicating directly with Trump’s legal team. The email suggested that informing Trump’s attorney that a warrant was being prepared could prompt cooperation and allow the documents to be secured without a search.
“At a minimum, even if the former president’s attorney is correct and the documents were all declassified (or believed to be declassified), it can be reasonably argued that the documents remain sensitive and should be properly secured until the matter of classification is sorted out,” the official wrote. The agent added that such a conversation could occur while investigators continued to build their case.
As weeks passed, frustration inside the bureau only grew. Another FBI agent wrote that the team had not developed any new facts despite repeatedly being asked to revise draft warrants.
“We haven’t generated any new facts, but keep being given draft after draft after draft,” the agent wrote. “Absent a witness coming forward with recent information about classified on site, at what point is it fair to table this?” The agent questioned whether it made sense to continue an investigation that was “time consuming” and “not productive” without new evidence supporting probable cause.
Perhaps most striking is another internal message revealing that the FBI’s Washington Field Office explicitly told DOJ officials that it did “not believe … that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar a Lago.”
Despite those internal warnings, the raid went forward — a decision that stunned the country and became one of the most controversial law enforcement actions in modern American history. According to Fox News Digital, one official involved in the decision-making process later said he did not “give a damn about the optics” of searching a former president’s home.
The newly revealed emails fuel long-standing Republican claims that the Mar-a-Lago raid was driven more by political pressure than by solid evidence, and that the Biden Justice Department pushed ahead despite clear reservations from career FBI officials. As more documents are declassified, questions continue to mount about how — and why — the decision was made to carry out a raid that even the FBI itself did not believe was legally justified.
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